Passionate Intelligence
Passionate Intelligence

Author: Arieh Sachs

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2019-12-01

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 1421435403

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Originally published in 1967. Professor Sachs shows the inner coherence of Samuel Johnson's thought by pointing out the interconnectedness of his remarks on religious, moral, aesthetic, political, and psychological subjects. Reason and imagination, the central concepts in the Johnsonian ethos, are elucidated with reference to "vacuity," "attention," "novelty," "diversity," and other words to which Johnson attached special significance. Johnson emerges as an original thinker of the English Christian-humanist heritage; he "is to be read in the same spirit as Pascal." Primarily concerned with the relation between Johnson's ideas and the long tradition of which they are the culmination, Sachs also emphasizes the relevance of Johnson's thought to the twentieth century.

The Passion for Happiness
The Passion for Happiness

Author: Adam Potkay

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780801437274

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Although widely perceived as inhabiting different, even opposed, literary worlds, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) and David Hume (1711-1776) shared common ground as moralists. Adam Potkay traces their central concerns to Hellenistic philosophy, as conveyed by Cicero, and to earlier moderns such as Addison and Mandeville. Johnson's and Hume's large and diverse bodies of writings, Potkay says, are unified by several key questions: What is happiness? What is the role of virtue in the happy life? What is the proper relationship between passion and reflection in the happy or flourishing individual? In their writings, Johnson and Hume largely agree upon what flourishing means for both human beings and the communities they inhabit. They also tell a common story about the history that led up to the enlightened age of eighteenth-century Europe. On the divisive topic of religion, these two great men of letters wrote with a decorum that characterizes the Enlightenment in Britain as compared to its French counterpart. In The Passion for Happiness, Adam Potkay illuminates much that philosophers and historians do not ordinarily appreciate about Hume, and that literary scholars might not recognize about Johnson.

Samuel Johnson: An Analysis
Samuel Johnson: An Analysis

Author: Charles H. Hinnant

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1988-04-25

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1349192082

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In this provocative and incisive book the author re-examines Samuel Johnson's major texts, focusing on his famous review of Soame Jenyns's A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil as a principal source of insight and innovation. He offers a lucid exposition of its ideas and methods, defining for the first time its relation to an important strand in eighteenth-century intellectual history, and assessing its implications for Johnson's moral vision. Hinnant's book will be an indispensable guide for anyone interested in understanding what is most modern in Johnson's thought and writings.

Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson

Author: Samuel Johnson

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-09-30

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 0674054075

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Thanks to Boswell’s monumental biography of Samuel Johnson, we remember Dr. Johnson today as a great wit and conversationalist, the rationalist epitome and the sage of the Enlightenment. He is more often quoted than read, his name invoked in party conversation on such diverse topics as marriage, sleep, deceit, mental concentration, and patriotism, to generally humorous effect. But in Johnson’s own day, he was best known as an essayist, critic, and lexicographer: a gifted writer possessed of great force of mind and wisdom. Writing a century after Johnson, Ruskin wrote of Johnson’s essays: He “taught me to measure life, and distrust fortune...he saved me forever from false thoughts and futile speculations.” Peter Martin here presents “the heart of Johnson,” a selection of some of Johnson’s best moral and critical essays. At the center of this collection are the periodical essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler. Also included are Johnson’s great moral fable, Rasselas; the Prefaces to the Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare; and selections from Lives of the Poets. Together, these works—allied in their literary, social, and moral concerns—are the ones that continue to speak urgently to readers today.

Samuel Johnson and the Tragic Sense
Samuel Johnson and the Tragic Sense

Author: Leopold Damrosch Jr.

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-03-08

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1400868009

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Tragedy in the eighteenth century is often said to have expired or been deflected into nondramatic forms like history and satire, and to have survived mainly as a "tragic sense" in writers like Samuel Johnson. Leopold Damrosch shows that many readers were still capable of an imaginative response to tragedy. In Johnson, however, moral and aesthetic assumptions limited his ability to appreciate or create tragedy, despite a deep understanding of human suffering. This limitation, Mr. Damrosch argues, derived partly from his Christian belief, and more largely from a view of reality that did not allow exclusive focus on its tragic aspects. The author discusses Irene, The vanity of Human Wishes, and Johnson's criticism of tragedy, particularly that of Shakespeare. A Final chapter places Johnson's view in the context of modern theories. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson
The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson

Author: Jack Lynch

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-09-22

Total Pages: 705

ISBN-13: 0198794665

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No major author worked in more genres than Samuel Johnson--essays, poetry, fiction, criticism, biography, scholarly editing, lexicography, translation, sermons, journalism. His works are more extensive than those of any other canonical English writer, and no earlier writer's life was documented as thoroughly by contemporaries. Because it's so difficult to know him thoroughly, people have made do with surrogates and simplifications. But Johnson was much more complicated than the popular image of 'Dr. Johnson' suggests: socially conservative but also one of the most radical abolitionists of his age, a firm believer in social hierarchy but an outspoken supporter of women intellectuals, an uncompromising Christian moralist but also a penetrating critic of family structures. Labels fit him poorly. In The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson, an international team of thirty-six scholars offers the most comprehensive examination ever attempted of one of the most complex figures in English literature. The book's first section examines Johnson's life and the texts of his works; the second, organized by genre, explores all his major works and many of his minor ones; the third, organized by topic, covers the subjects that were most important to him as a writer, as a thinker, and as a moralist.